At NRF Asia 2025 this year, Hakuhodo organized a much larger exhibition this year along with our partners - NTT Docomo, unerry, True Data, and Firework - to highlight the rise of Unified Commerce. The modern retail landscape is a dynamic arena, constantly reshaped by evolving consumer demands for more integrated and more personalized shopping experiences while brands and agencies try to match that demand. At the heart of this shift lie two pivotal strategies: omnichannel and unified commerce. Omnichannel has been something agencies have touted for a while as being the holy grail of consumer marketing.This is distinct from Unified Commerce and may be the key to help a brand to not just to survive, but to thrive and lead in today's competitive market.

Omnichannel vs. Unified Commerce: A Critical Distinction for the Retail Evolution

At its core, omnichannel is a strategy that arose from the marketing playbook, primarily concerned with optimizing the customer's journey and their consistent exposure to a brand across various marketing touch points, typically leading up to the point of purchase. Its primary aim is to ensure that whether a customer interacts with your website, mobile app, social media presence, email campaigns, or a physical store, the brand messaging, visual identity, and basic information remain consistent. This approach creates a cohesive brand presence, preventing jarring shifts in experience as a customer moves between channels. However, a key limitation of omni channel often lies beneath the surface: while channels might communicate and share some information, they frequently operate on separate, albeit integrated, underlying systems or platforms. This means data synchronization can be a challenge, sometimes leading to delays or inconsistencies, and a truly real-time, comprehensive insight into every customer interaction across all platforms may be elusive. Omni channel is about coordinating different marketing silos to present a unified front. And more importantly, omni channel does not focus on attributing media to all sales channels - online or offline.

Unified commerce, conversely, represents a deeper architectural shift towards attributing marketing to actual sales. It transcends the marketing focus by integrating all data –including exhaustive sales data from every single purchase channel (online, in-store, mobile, social, marketplace), alongside all marketing efforts, customer service interactions, and back-end operations – into a single, centralized platform. This foundational integration means that unified commerce isn't just about consistency in customer-facing channels (like omnichannel); it fundamentally breaks down internal data silos by unifying everything from inventory management and order fulfillment to customer relationship management and payment processing. This transformation within a brand brings marketing efforts closer to the actual purchases so it can better understand what efforts worked and what can be improved. This deeper understanding empowers businesses to personalize experiences not just before a purchase, but throughout the entire customer journey, from initial brand discovery and first engagement to post-purchase support, loyalty program interactions, and repeat transactions.In essence, while omnichannel is about connecting disparate marketing systems to appear seamless to the customer, unified commerce is about collapsing all those disparate systems, and more, into a single, real-time "nervous system" for the entire business.

TheIntegrated Architecture: Key Components of Unified Commerce

• DiverseSales Channels: This includes your primary e-commerce platform, ensuring it's robust enough to handle high volumes and integrate with other systems. It extends to modern Point-of-Sale(POS) systems in physical stores, which are no longer just cash registers but sophisticated data capture devices connected to the central platform.Beyond these, it incorporates mobile apps, social commerce integrations, marketplace sales (like Amazon, Lazada, Shopee), and even emerging channels.The goal is that any transaction, regardless of where it occurs, instantly updates the centralized data platform.
  ‍
• ComprehensiveMarketing Efforts: Every touchpoint where a customer interacts with your brand for marketing purposes must feed into the unified system. This includes website analytics, email marketing platforms, social media engagement tools, content management systems, and advertising platforms. By integrating these, every click, view, and interaction contributes to the single customer profile. Even with “traditional”media channels, Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) can be used to get a complete picture.
  ‍
• ConsolidatedSales Data: This is the bedrock.Every purchase, return, exchange, and even Browse activity is logged in the central system, irrespective of the channel. This sales data is crucial for accurate inventory management, personalized recommendations, and understanding purchasing patterns. Tying as much sales instances to consumers’ various touchpoints with the brand will enable more effective attribution modeling from marketing to the eventual transaction.

Unifying commerce requires linking key tech. Headless commerce builds flexible customer experiences by separating front-end from back-end, enabling rapid new customer experiences without disrupting core systems. AI acts as a smart layer, transforming data into insights and personalization—from product recommendations and dynamic pricing to predictive analytics and efficient customer service. Integrated personalization and loyalty systems are vital for consistent customer recognition and tailored messages across all touchpoints, building strong relationships. Finally, a unified marketing tech stack andCustomer Data Platform (CDP) centralize all customer data into a single, real-time profile, enabling hyper-personalized outreach and proactive service.Combining headless architecture, AI, personalization, and a unified data platform optimizes operations, personalizes outreach, and anticipates needs, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty.

TheData Unification Imperative: Challenges and APAC Complexities

Historically, the vision of finding and combining all this disparate data has been an elusive goal, often seen as incredibly difficult, if not outright impossible, for many businesses. Legacy systems, developed in isolation on legacy IT infrastructure, created impenetrable data silos where information remained trapped within specific departments or channels. Manual processes, little or no strategic vision and a lack of sophisticated integration tools further compounded the challenge, leading to fragmented customer views, delayed insights, and significant operational inefficiencies.Furthermore, as these data may reside in different business units of a company, strategic decisions need to be made about data sharing, data ownership and data security.

However, the rapid acceleration of digital adoption in the last 20years and the transformative maturation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) a remaking this profound level of data unification increasingly attainable. Modern cloud-native platforms are engineered to ingest and process vast amounts of data from virtually any source in almost real-time, laying the indispensable groundwork for a truly unified approach. These platforms leverage APIs(Application Programming Interfaces) to create seamless connections between different systems, enabling a continuous flow of information. Data science can further enhance the value by finding correlations and look-a-likes between different data sets.

Despite these technological advancements, implementing unified commerce presents unique and often intensified challenges, particularly within the Asia-Pacific (APAC)region. The APAC market is characterized by an extraordinary degree of fragmentation and diversity. This includes:

• MyriadSales Channels: Beyond traditional e-commerce and physical stores, APAC sees a proliferation of social commerce, live commerce, and diverse local marketplaces (e.g., Shopee, Lazada,Tokopedia, Taobao), each with its own data structures and APIs.
  ‍
• DiversePayment Methods: From credit cards and e-wallets (e.g., GrabPay, GoPay, Alipay, WeChat Pay) to bank transfers and cash-on-delivery, the variety of payment options adds layers of complexity to transaction data consolidation.
  ‍
• VariedAdvertising Ecosystems: Different countries have dominant local advertising platforms and preferred social media channels, leading to highly disparate marketing data sources.
  ‍
• Cultural and Linguistic Nuances: Multi-language support, localized content, and culturally sensitive messaging generate unique data points that need careful integration and interpretation.LLMs are still being localized to various languages.
  ‍
• DisparateRegulatory Frameworks: Data privacy laws (e.g., PDPA in Singapore, PIPL in China) vary significantly across the region, adding compliance complexities to data consolidation and usage.
  ‍
• Prevalence of Super Apps: The dominance of"super apps" like WeChat and Grab, which integrate a vast array of services, means customer interactions and data are often contained within these ecosystems, requiring specific integration strategies.

This inherent disparity in data sources, in addition to varying digital maturity levels across markets and complex logistics networks, can make the integration process significantly more intricate and resource-intensive than in more homogenous larger Western markets. Overcoming these entrenched data silos and ensuring real-time synchronization across such a vast and diverse ecosystem requires not only substantial investment in cutting-edge technology but also a meticulous, strategic, multi-year approach to data governance and a deep understanding of local market dynamics. Failure to address these challenges can lead to missed opportunities for hyper-personalization, suboptimal customer experiences, and ultimately, a loss of competitive edge.

TheFuture of Retail: Agentic AI and Hyper-Personalization

The trajectory of commerce unequivocally points towards more advanced forms of Artificial Intelligence, specifically agentic AI, and a dramatic escalation in the hyper-personalization of the customer experience. Agentic AI refers to AI systems that possess the capability to independently initiate actions and make decisions to achieve specific goals, often by intelligently interacting with various systems and drawing insights from vast datasets.Imagine AI agents that can proactively anticipate a customer's needs based on their Browse history, past purchases, and even external factors, then automatically suggest highly relevant products, initiate a personalized re-engagement campaign, or even schedule a virtual consultation, all without direct human intervention.

This idealized level of sophisticated, proactive personalization will only become truly feasible and scalable through a comprehensive understanding of customers' total exposure and behavior to the brand, including their entire buying experience. A truly unified commerce platform provides the indispensable, almost real-time, and granular data foundation necessary for tools like agentic AI to flourish. The result is an unprecedented level of customer satisfaction and loyalty, transforming transactional relationships into enduring brand advocacy.